Audiobus: Use your music apps together.

What is Audiobus?Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.

Download on the App Store

Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

File and Folder Shortcuts on the iPad Home Screen

You can have file and folder shortcuts on the iPad Home Screen. It can be very convenient if you have some folders you use a lot.

Example:

I use Xequence 2 a lot, so I have created a shortcut to the folder “On my iPad/Xequence 2/Midi Files”.

When I want to access the files in this folder, I can just press my Xequence 2 folder icon on the Home Screen and then the files app opens up this specific folder.

Here is a screenshot of my Home Screen, with 3 folder shortcuts to Xequence 2, Sweet Midi and Korg Gadget.

You can have shortcuts to files on the Home Screen too, but I don’t find them very useful, because when you press the shortcut they don’t open the file in the app it belongs to.

Example:

I’ve made a shortcut to an AUM project and when I press it, I would have wanted it to open up in AUM, but instead it opens in Quick Look preview mode:

Maybe it’s possible to make it open up in AUM, but I haven’t figured out how 🤔

So for now, I don’t find shortcuts to files very useful.

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How to make file and folder shortcuts

Well it’s not something I made, but I stumbled upon this article on macstories:

https://www.macstories.net/ios/fs-bookmarks-a-shortcut-to-reopen-files-and-folders-directly-in-the-files-app/

where they have made a shortcut to create file and folder shortcuts.

What you need is:

Apple’s free Shortcuts app

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1462947752

The free Scriptable app

https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1405459188

The FS Bookmarks shortcut, which you can get at the bottom of the page from this link

https://www.macstories.net/ios/fs-bookmarks-a-shortcut-to-reopen-files-and-folders-directly-in-the-files-app/

The article mentions SLC which costs money, but you don’t need that.

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How to create a folder shortcut - step by step

The article on macstories describes how to do it, but I made an easy step by step guide with screenshots here too:

(I’m from Denmark, so some of the screenshots contains Danish language 😊)

  1. Press the FS Bookmarks shortcut. The first time it runs, it will ask to install two scripts in Scriptable. Just do that.
  2. When you run FS Bookmarks after the scripts has been installed, it will ask you what you want to do:

Select “Create New Folder Bookmark” and then you’ll get this message:

  1. In Scriptable press the gears symbol in the upper left corner:

  1. Press “File Bookmarks”:

  1. Press on the “+” symbol in the upper right corner and select “Pick Folder”:

  1. Select a folder/sub folder from iCloud Drive or On my iPad. You cannot select a folder from locations like AudioShare or OneDrive:

  1. Choose a name for the bookmark:

  1. Run the FS Bookmarks again, but this time select “Get Existing File or Folder Bookmark”

  1. Select “Folder”

  1. Input the name you gave the folder bookmark.

  1. You will get this message. Tap Ok

  1. Do you want to create a launcher shortcut for this folder ? Select No I’ll do it later

  1. Then you’ll get a message saying the folder link is copied to the clipboard

  1. Now you just need to create a new shortcut and you’re done. Press “+” in the Shortcuts app

  1. Search for url and select the open url (or whatever it’s called, mine is in danish)

  1. Paste in the folder link and press next and give the shortcut a name and tap ok.

  1. Open the bookmarks setting again and tap the 3 dots next to the name and tap add to Home Screen.

That’s it, now you have a folder shortcut on your home screen 😊

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One last thing, a tip for the files app. You problably already know this, but I'll post it anyway:

Open two instances of the files app in split view to easily drag and drop files from one location to another.

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